34 NOVEMBER 14 2019

‘I like daunting. I want to go to places I haven’t been’Lauren Gunderson is America’s most produced playwright but she has never staged a play on Broadway. She tells Howard Sherman why Shakespeare’s work remains so important and what draws her to the West Coast

Lauren Gunderson is officially the most popu-lar playwright in the US. She recently topped American Theatre magazine’s annual list of most produced playwrights, with 33 productions appear-ing in theatres during the 2019/20 season.

It is the second time in three years that Gun-derson has been named most produced playwright – excluding Shakespeare – and last season she was second. And she con-tinues to be prolific, with two plays premiering in the next few weeks: The Half-Life of Marie Curie, produced by Audible, at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York, and her version of Peter Pan and Wendy at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall in Washington DC.

Both, she says, are connected by science. In a play about Curie that seems self-evident, but what about Peter Pan? “There’s bravery to the original Wendy,” Gunderson says. “I mean, she jumps out a window with a kid who can fly to go to a land of adventure. So I thought, let’s take her curiosity to the next level, add some science to it, add some female representa-tion to it.” She describes Wendy in her version as: “A scientist in the world of fantasy – she applies scientific principles to the adventures she has with Peter.”

The Curie play has an unusual genesis: a Google Doodle – the images on the search engine’s homepage that regularly pay homage to certain figures or events.

After a few clicks, Gunderson learned about another sci-entist, Hertha Ayrton, who is the other character in the play, which takes place after the death of Curie’s husband. This is not her first play to explore women’s impact on the sciences. Others include: Ada and the Engine, telling the story of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbidge, Eye of the Beheld, about a young woman who inspires Leonardo da Vinci, and Silent Sky, drawn from the life of astronomer Henrietta Leavitt.

Gunderson says: “I don’t think we’ll ever be done talking about science. Frankly, when I started writing science plays 20 years ago, the world was different. We went from having a president who loves science to a president who doesn’t trust it, and actively ignores and denies it. We’re in a world of full-scale denialism right now, and that’s not just distressing, it’s dangerous.”

While directly linking politics and science, Gunderson makes it clear there’s another important theme running through all of these plays: the female lens on science and its culture. “A lot of the plays are about feminism and sexism as they relate to science. Inevitably there will be some line in a play of mine that is about how science itself is sexless, so why is there so much sexism in it?”

Science is hardly the only area that Gunderson’s work explores. She has written a four-play Shakespeare cycle, which aren’t adaptations of his plays but rather a transposition of and conversation with them. The cycle is comprised of Exit, Pursued by a Bear, Toil and Trouble, The Taming, and We Are Denmark – the titles make clear their linkage to particular works. She says, on reflection, her play Natural Shocks should have been part of the cycle. Her 2017 play The Book of Will is about the setting down of Shakespeare’s plays after his death.

Since there have been countless books about Shakespeare, and the plays themselves say so much, she believes her drama-tisation of the creation of the First Folio speaks to something larger. “It becomes a story to me about theatremaking. It’s about the community that is behind every single production,

MONICA SIMOES

‘We’re in a world of full-scale denialism right now, and that’s not just distressing, it’s dangerous’

Lauren Gunderson at rehearsals for The Half-Life of Marie Curie (left); Cristofer Jean in The Book of Will at Oregon Shakespeare Festival last year (below)

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Born: Atlanta, Georgia, 1982Training: English and Creative Writing, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, 2004; MFA in Dramatic Writing, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, 2009Landmark productions: s��%MILIE��3OUTH�#OAST�2EP��

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s��%ARTHRISE��4HE�+ENNEDY�Center, Washington DC (2019)

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35NOVEMBER 14 2019

Coast. One year, soon after moving, five major productions of her work were staged there over 12 months, including the premieres of Exit, Pursued by a Bear and I and You.

She remembers thinking: “Playwrights would kill for this kind of community – this supportive and this robust, with different kinds of theatres. I didn’t expect that I was making a big state-ment or doing something provocative. It just felt right. You’ve got to go with what feels right, and it’s art, so go where you can write, go where you can make, go where you can be yourself.”

As Gunderson’s star has risen, it is regularly noted that her ‘most-produced’ status has been achieved without many New York productions, and none on Broadway, as if that somehow puts an asterisk on her success. Rather, that qualifier, tinged at times with condescension, merely reveals the New York-centric thinking that pervades too much of the theatre industry.

Gunderson regularly finds herself having the same conversa-tions about her work. “A lot of people in a cocktail situation ask: ‘Oh, what do you do?’ ‘I’m a playwright.’ ‘Have you writ-ten anything I would know?’ And my first question is always: ‘Do you go see theatre?’ If they say: ‘Not really,’ I’ll say: ‘Well, probably not. But if you do go to theatre, if you do especially like new plays, then you probably will have seen something of mine, or a poster of mine. It might be on the season of your local theatre company.’ But new plays are still not the same things as new novels and new films. There’s still a bit of a boutique quality to this profession.”

Given the range of her work, is there a ‘Lauren Gunderson-type’ play? “You can probably count on my plays not ending in a terribly negative, dark, hopeless space,” she observes. “I don’t have that kind of edge to my writing. And by edge, the edge of the cliff on which you perilously fall to your doom. I have what I think of as a hard hope at the end of most of my plays. Whatever you have been through in that play, you can come out of it feeling like it didn’t work out perfectly, and the world isn’t a happy place for everyone, but it’s worth living, it’s worth fighting for good things.”

Gunderson say she likes theatricality, spectacle and twists at the end. But now she’s pondering what her next works will involve. “I had a point a couple years ago of thinking: ‘What is something you haven’t done? What is something that will scare me and challenge me to write? I know I can write a play now, but it’s not as daunting as it used to be. I like daunting. I like finding that challenge. I want to go to places I haven’t been.”

The Half-Life of Marie Curie runs at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York until December 22 and Peter Pan and Wendy runs at Sidney Harman Hall in Washington DC until January 12. Details: thehalflifeofmariecurie.com and shakespearetheatre.org

no matter what it is, and the brotherhood and sisterhood and the collectivism that is responsible for every great thing, really.”

Shakespeare is always relevant, Gunderson says. “He wrote about such universal themes, such great human experiences, that I’m never at a loss for something to riff on when you look at his work.” She reveals that a play about Gertrude and Ophelia from Hamlet is in the works.

Gunderson began writing plays in high school, with one picked up by the prestigious Young Playwrights Festival in New York and her first full-length play produced by Essential Theatre in Atlanta. She acted in college – “I was actually not a bad mime, hilariously” – and took a graduate degree at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Even with several productions under her belt, her education at NYU Tisch was essential.

“I didn’t have a ton of structural training,” she says. “I didn’t know the landscape of American theatre. I knew the interiority of my own head and I knew my keyboard and my computer.” She goes on to say that her big discovery in grad school was dramatic structure. “The way they break you down, and say, ‘I know you’ve got your thing, and you’re funny, or you’re serious, or you write poetically. But can you tell me what your play is about? What do they want and how do they get it? Can you tell me a simple, simple story of this thing?”

After completing her graduate degree, in contrast to conven-tional thinking, Gunderson left New York. Thanks to a summer at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and several residencies and workshops, she found herself in San Francisco and decided to stay. Making it clear she loves New York, she also professes a passion for the Bay Area – and opportunities on the West

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‘You can count on my plays not ending in a terribly negative, dark, hopeless space’

Q&A

What was your first non-theatre job? Scooping ice cream probably.

What was your first professional theatre job? Actor in Tina Howe’s Approaching Zanzibar at Actors Express in Atlanta.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? Write what you want to see. Write what matters to you. Life’s too short, only read the good reviews.

Who or what was your biggest influence? My colleagues. I am never more inspired than when I see a new play that shakes and thrills me.

What’s your best advice for auditions? Don’t ad lib dialogue. Trust the script. Ask questions. Talk fast. Have fun.

If you hadn’t been a playwright, what would you have been? An under-employed actor.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals? Like everyone in the theatre, I despair when we are in tech and am convinced the show is terrible and that no one should ever come to see it. Then I’m wrong. Usually.

Erik Hellman and Emily Berman in Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley at Northlight Theatre, Illinois in 2016 (top left); Kayla Ferguson and Reggie D White in I and You at 59E59 Theaters, New York in 2016 (top right) and, left, Maryn Shaw, Sean McNall and Kurt Rhoads in Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s 2017 production of The Book of Will

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